From the first lines of The Turtle House, debut historical fiction author Amanda Churchill signals how she plans to spin her masterful family saga from prewar Japan to late 20th Century Texas ranch country.
Curtain, Texas
March 1, 1999
Paper hates water. It hates wind. And fire. Paper falls apart. There is no home safe enough for paper, did you know this?
Sometimes my grandmother speaks like an oracle. I mess with the recorder settings, make sure the microphone will pick up what she says next, feeling that she is about to tell me something that I will need to know, sometime, somewhere.
And there you have it: The Turtle House, though billed as historical fiction, family drama, women’s lit, and a coming of age tale (perhaps two), is first and foremost a novel of voice. More accurately, two voices, those of the grandmother and granddaughter who open the book.
The first, and most compelling, of these voices belongs to Mineko Cope, 73 and at the story’s beginning, staying temporarily and uncomfortably with her son’s family after burning down (not intentionally, she insists) her ranch home. She’d come to Texas forty years earlier, a Japanese war bride fleeing the devastation of her small city after the WWII Osaka Prefecture bombings, determined to make some sort of life for herself and her children on her authoritarian husband’s family ranch. As Mineko’s dutiful son and kind but increasingly impatient daughter-in-law fuss over where the cantankerous old lady will spend her final years, Mineko spends her days sneaking cigarettes and telling the story of her youth in prewar Japan to her granddaughter, Lia.
Lia is The Turtle House’s other distinctive female voice. Her story plays out in the late 1990s in Austin and her hometown of Curtain, Texas and provides quiet harmony to Mineko’s account of her fierce struggles with a disapproving family, a forbidden first love, wartime survival, and resettlement in a foreign country (are there two places more different than small town Japan and rural Texas?) without command of the language, understanding of the social norms, or the support of friends or a loving spouse. At the novel’s start, Lia, 25, is also taking refuge in her parents’ home after flaming out of a high profile architecture job in Austin and fleeing the city she’d come to love.
At first, there seems to be little connection between the two main story lines of Turtle House: Mineko’s life journey from Japan to Texas and Lia’s much briefer trip through grueling graduate work in architecture to an abbreviated stint at an Austin megafirm. But like other masters of the dual timeline — Rebecca Makkai in her classic, The Great Believers or Taylor Jenkins Reid in her recent bestseller The Seven Husbands of Evelyn Hugo, for instance — Churchill subtly floats the threads of the two women’s stories closer and closer until they catch and knit together in satisfying and often surprising ways.
Both Lia and Mineko, for example, have (or in Lia’s case are developing) a sense of self that is at odds with (most of) the men in their lives and a society that won’t tolerate women who are different and strong. For Lia, that plays out at first as a mixed race child in lily white rural Texas (she’s told by her father that she was “just Japanese enough and people can sniff out anyone different”). Later, Lia, operating in the pre-“me-too” era, has to figure out how navigate a career she adores in an industry run (as most were back in the 90s, if we’re being honest) by a predatory patriarchy. Mineko’s challenges on that front are even more extreme: the oppressive view of the subservient role of women in prewar Japan; the American soldiers who destroyed the homes of Japanese women then, in Mineko’s case begrudgingly, brought them to their own homes as war brides; the byzantine social norms that dictated the behavior of a proper 1950s Texas wife.
Attending a ladies’ social gathering near her Texas home, Mineko realizes she will never satisfy her husband’s desire that she “dissolve into America like sugar.”
Mineko felt again the hidden rules. They were invisible, lightly strung cobwebs, easy enough to walk through , but persistent, the filament stuck against the chest, always found later. Another moment of delayed embarrassment, another thought in the night as she stared out at the flat fields, the light in the barn. I said it wrong. But how did I say it wrong?
“She missed home” are the words Churchill uses to cap this instance of Mineko’s self reflection, and there hits on another theme deftly woven through both Lia and Mineko’s tales: Where and what is one’s true home. These questions drive the 1990s storyline in obvious ways: Where will Mineko make her final home now that she’s torched her longtime ranch home? Has Lia returned for good to the childhood home she’s outgrown or will she make her way back to Austin and the life she built there? (A subplot involves the pressure Lia feels to choose commercial over residential architecture, which fits in well).
But it’s in Mineko’s recollections of her youth where Churchill’s lofty ideas of the intersection of home and self are on full display. There’s Mineko’s chilly childhood homestead, where a mild father and a disapproving mother clash with Mineko’s independent spirit; the American army base’s married housing, a short step up from the hovels Mineko escaped to after Japan surrendered; the dust-swept Texas ranch where she raised her children; and, of course, the solid center of Mineko’s story, the titular Turtle House, an abandoned country estate that Mineko escapes to as a girl to avoid her nagging mother. There, she is fully herself as she swims in the pond, feeds the resident turtles, and dreams of what the place could become if she were allowed to inhabit it for real. Throughout her story, she harkens back to Turtle House, and in doing so reminds herself, and teaches Lia, what home really is: not place or even family but space to be oneself. A rare, hard won prize.
Mineko’s brings her first love to Turtle House:
He kneeled next to the irori, filled with sand and ash. “You would like to live here one day,” Aiko said.
…“Everyone wants newer and more modern buildings, but there’s still something beautiful here.” Mineko paused. She made sure to look Akio in the eye.
“It’s made well.”
As is any true home. As is Churchill’s gorgeous novel — a deliciously complex odyssey led by two compelling narrators, winding from beautifully rendered place to place to place to land finally on a vision of home made richer and deeper at every step of the journey.
FICTION
The Turtle House
By Amanda Churchill
Harper
HarperCollins Publishers
Published February 20, 2024
Southern Review of Books 